A practical development of engineering simulation-assisted educational AR environments

Abstract

Engineering simulations have opened several gates for today's chemical engineers. They are powerful tools to provide technical content as physics-based numerical solvers. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), on the other hand, are already underway to digitize environments in many fields. The combination of AR/VR environments and simulations in engineering education has been attracting widespread interest. Literature has demonstrated a massive amount of educational digital environments in several contexts as being complementary to conventional educational methods. Nevertheless, hosting technical content produced by engineering simulations with educational AR/VR is still challenging and requires expertise from multiple disciplines throughout the technical development. Present work provides a facile and agile methodology for low-cost hardware but content-wise rich AR software development. A case study is developed to teach chemical-engineering concepts using a liquid-soap synthesis process. Accordingly, we assess and conclude the digital development process to guide unexperienced developers for the digitalization of teaching content. The present contribution serves as an example of the power of integrating AR/VR with traditional engineering simulations for educational purposes. The digital tool developed in this work is shared in the online version.

Academia's responses to crisis: A bibliometric analysis of literature on online learning in higher education during COVID‐19

“…Nevertheless, multiple technologies and innovations emerged from these clusters. For example, Cluster 5 illustrates that researchers investigated the design and effectiveness of flipped classrooms (Collado‐Valero et al., 2021 ), augmented reality (eg, Eldokhny & Drwish, 2021 ; Solmaz et al., 2021 ) and virtual reality (eg, Akdere et al., 2021 ) on student performance, especially for chemistry (eg, Dunnagan et al., 2020 ; Rodriguez et al., 2020 ). Cluster 6 illustrates that the concept of gamification (eg, Fontana, 2020 ; Petchamé et al., 2021 ), as well as digital tools such as Zoom (eg, Ghounane, 2020 ) and Moodle (Molchanova et al., 2020 ) were frequently used to support classroom experiences in distance learning settings.…”

A Systematic Literature Review of Augmented Reality in Engineering Education : Hardware, Software, Student Motivation & Development Recommendations.

“…Although the educational benefits that AR provides in education are undeniable, it is also relevant to establish some concerns that researchers have shown. The content of the application, the accessibility of the didactic method, the prices of the devices (since devices with the optimal Benefits of AR in Education -Efficiency in the learning process features tend to have higher prices), the portability of the digital resources, the experiments in controlled environments and the procedures to develop AR applications (Beck 2019;Akçayır & Akçayır 2017;Solmaz et al 2021). Many documents also points out the methodological limitations in the studies as well as lack of primary studies about student´s learning achievement (Buchner, Buntins & Kerres 2021), usability issues due the extra cognitive burden for students (Radu 2014;Hincapie et al 2021) and difficulties in the use of this technology (Lin et al 2011).…”

Application of VR technology in civil engineering education

“…Usually, engineering schools have little visual information, and students mainly listen to lectures and reading materials. However, most students are visual learners, so that visual interaction patterns can be an exciting teaching tool [20]. Virtual models can be beneficial in face‐to‐face courses and distance learning using e‐learning technologies.…”